


Powder Burns, Blood and Magic

by Nadia_Hernandez



Category: Charmed (TV 2018)
Genre: Blood and Injury, F/M, Hurt, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, Major Character Injury, Mild Blood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-09
Updated: 2019-07-09
Packaged: 2020-06-25 00:17:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19734556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nadia_Hernandez/pseuds/Nadia_Hernandez
Summary: So demons use guns now--who knew? It's a concern but actually the last thing on Macy's mind.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So, this weirdly turned into a story about gun violence but not in a very special episode way, I hope. Can't wait for next season!

Macy slumps against the wall, teeth clenched, and growls at the waves of agony lancing up her leg, through her groin and belly, all the way to the roots of her hair. “Son of a bitch, son of a bitch, son of a bitch!”

Maggie, who has appeared from what seems to be nowhere, nudges beneath her arm to keep her from collapsing. “Hey, it’s okay. It’s okay. I’ve got you.” 

Macy sees the blood seething from the ragged hole in her jeans to pool on the hem of her sister’s carnation pink and saffron yellow blouse. “Sorry about your outfit,” she mumbles.

“This old thing?” Maggie says. “Don’t worry about it. I was basically gonna throw it away anyway. It wasn’t even good enough for charity. Gotta keep the homeless fashionable otherwise they’ll never get a good job with the city or have, er… homes.”

Macy realizes that Maggie is babbling because she is eighteen and terrified and her dark eyes have grown huge in the face that swims in front of her. She tries to smile but it turns into a grimace. “Gotcha. Style for the homeless is all important.” She looks up to Mel who stands about ten feet away near the debris of their late battle. “Did I get him?”

“Yeah,” she says. “When your power evolved it kinda did it in a big way… he’s over here and there and there and…” She points in a vague circle. “He’s sorta all around.”

“Good,” she says before a long, shuddering moan escapes her lips.” “Freaking bacalogoi--he and his boss can stop creeping around Hilltown.” It’s probably not a smart thing to say, Bacalou is a powerful loa that is swift to anger and difficult to assuage once his ire has been aroused. “How’s our innocent?”

“She’s fine, she’s good,” Mel says. “A little dazed. May not even need a memory wipe--I think she thought that the bacalogoi was mugging her.” The young woman lying beside a puddle of demon goo, a French education major with ochre skin that Maggie knows of but does not know, seems to be on another planet. “We’re gonna need a cleanup crew here, though. Or… whatever Harry does to make our more impressive messes go away. How’s your leg?”

“Fine, it’s fine.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Why? Developed some eleventh hour powers of perception?” 

“Because Maggie’s shirt was yellow before she started holding you up. It’s red, now. And so are your pants. And so is a lot of the ground. We need Harry, like, five minutes ago.” She called their Whitelighter. He did not answer. 

Mel stamped. “Dammit, where is he! Harry? Harry! Get your magical ass over here!”

“I don’t think it works like that,” Maggie says. Her voice is thin. “If he’s not coming then he can’t come. He wouldn’t hang us out to dry--he just wouldn’t.”

She turns big, pleading eyes up towards her sister. “I know you’re scared but try to stay with me, okay? Stay strong.”

It seems funny, filtered through the lens of a what has become a very hazy world indeed, that Maggie thinks that she is scared. Macy whispers a sigh. “What makes you think I’m scared, baby?”

“Cause you’re cold and clammy and your heart is beating like a trillion times a minute.”

“Not scared,” she says. “Pretty calm actually.”

“Then how do you explain all that?”

“Easy.” It’s harder to stand, now, even with Maggie helping to hold her up. Mel joins them and offers her help but it’s still just. So. Damn. Hard. To stand, to care… one or the other. Both? It’d be nice to take a nap but she has to explain, first. “I’m pretty sure that I’m about to decompensate so… yeah. Just let me take a nap, guys. Dying wears a girl out.”

Maggie blinks back tears but she’s very far away and it’s just so hard to give a damn. She is numinous in her desperate grief, Macy reflects, but the agonies of an earthly goddess are lost on one about to navigate the great beyond. “Harry!” she hears her sister cry. “C’mon, Harry… please!” Her melifluous voice is broken, pain-strangled, that of a child confronted at last by that which has tormented her from beneath the bed or in the closet. “Please!”

“He’s not coming.” Mel is wormwood in the half-light haze. “I don’t know why but he’s not. We’ve got to do… something.” She unbuckles her belt and whips it through the loops of her pants. Macy is unsure how a striptease is going to help but Mel usually has good ideas. “Help me sit her down,” she says. “Make sure to stretch that leg out… I’m gonna go over here and rummage and see if I can find something.”

They lower her more or less gently to the asphalt. She sits in the wide pool of thick, tacky blood and is annoyed, vaguely, that these jeans are ruined. They’re nice, relatively new and--if Galvin and Harry’s goggle eyes are anything to go by--her ass smashes in them. She’s not too mad, though. It’s hard to be mad when you’re, you know… dead.

She is a bit more concerned when she sees, for the first time, hunks of ragged meat protruding from the ruin of her thigh. It’s not the femoral artery, she’s pretty sure, because she’s not dead already and the blood is not spurting madly. Perhaps the femoral or great saphenous vein? The gush is slow but profuse and seems inky dark but that might be just a trick of the low light. It helps to think about these kind of things in a clinical fashion, though. The alternative is awful.

Mel floats into her vision. “Okay.. I found something. I’m gonna wrap my belt around your leg and it’s gonna get kinda tight. Okay, chica? I think it’s gonna hurt like eight bastards in an ass boat so just hold on to Maggie, okay? You can scream or whatever you want just hold on.”

She promises to, or means to promise to at least, when the horrific, wet squeezing bites into the pearlescent exposed fat and raw muscle of her leg to clamp its blood flow tight. It does hurt like eight bastards in an ass boat and, quickly enough, Macy knows nothing, not even whether or not she is dead. It might be a mercy at this point, though, because anything is better than that kind of pain.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The long awaited conclusion. Heh. Real life kinda got in the way a little bit but here we go!

When Macy awakens she feels like the underside of a four-wheeler after it has been driven through a field of cactus, over broken glass and--possibly--submerged in lava. She coughs, blinks and coughs again. “Dude, I was having the craziest dream…”

She catches an exuberant, squealing armful of Maggie. “Oh my God! Oh em gee! You’re alive. Thank God. Or the gods… or goddessess… or, you know… something. You’re alive!”

“I was when I went to bed, I guess,” Macy croaks--jeez she needs a glass of water, or maybe something a little more fortifying like Dr. Pepper. “Any reason you thought I might not be?”

Maggie draws back and frowns. “You don’t remember?”

“She doesn’t remember,” Mel says, from the foot of the bed. “So you probably shouldn’t just, like, spring it on her like this. It might make her go mad from the revelation or demon out on us or… something.”

“She is not gonna demon out, Melanie Vera,” Maggie says. “I can’t believe you’d even say something like that. She’s as weak as a kitten!”

Mel shrugs. “It could be a demon kitten.”

Macy tries to laugh but finds, like swallowing, that this hurts her throat so she gives up on it. “You guys need to stop talking about me like I’m not here or I swear to god that I am gonna go all demon on your asses--and it will not be a demon kitten. What’s going on here?”

“It’s kinda complicated…” Mel says.

Before she can go on, Maggie interrupts her. “Not super complicated, but sorta.”

“How so?”

“You may have possibly, er, slightly… died.”

“Again?”

“Again.”

“Damn, maybe I am gonna be a kitten demon. I sure as hell seem to have nine lives. How did it happen?”

“It’s the craziest thing,” Maggie says. “We were fighting this crazy voodoo guy with our magic to save a French major--bang, zoom, bonjour--and we were just, like, brutally kicking his ass. Mel would freeze him and you would toss him and I’d just sorta…” She scrunches up her face here and pushes the air in front of her as if it was tangible. “I’d just sorta, you know, feel things at him. Feel scared, or sad, or confused. It was really jacking him up!”

“That sounds like an awesome story of our success,” Macy says, “not one about how I nearly died.”

“We’re getting to that part,” Mel says. “Cause when you were bouncing the demon up and down on the pavement like a basketball he whipped out a gun and, well… shot you.”

Macy’s eyes grow wide. “He no joke shot me?”

“Right in the leg,” Maggie says. “There was a ton of blood. And then there were… other fluids. Cause your powers took a huge jolt, pain or adrenaline or something, and the demon guy sorta…” She clasps her small hands and then lets them fly apart. “He sorta went kablooey.”

“Shot by a demon. Huh. Never heard a better argument for gun control, I guess,” Macy says. “Where was Harry? How did it get so bad? Why didn’t he heal me?”

He enters the room, then, bearing a tray of breakfast and wearing the floral print apron that Macy finds dorky and adorable in equal measure. The breakfast is for all three of them--Maggie’s vegan sausage and Mel’s chorizo on a bun say that--but the double stacked cheeseburger omelet with table cream is all her. She imagines that the steaming mug is her favored cafe latte, too, with enough cream and sugar to qualify as a milkshake if it cools off. It all smells heavenly and she is struck for an instant by how hungry she is and how weak she feels.

“I couldn’t get to you to heal you,” he says, sitting on the edge of her bed and sliding the tray over her lap, “because Bacalou blocked me from the area until he was good and ready to let me in. He was furious that you ladies were handling one of his minions so adroitly.” He grimaces. “I fought against him for what felt like forever, begged him, tried to bargain or trick him. He laughed. I’d have never made it had Erzulie Freda not intervened. We owe her much and more.”

“No freaking kidding,” Macy murmurs. “That still doesn’t explain why he shot me instead of using evil magic or rending me with his demonic claws, or something.”

“You and your sisters have proven to be well able to defend yourself from magic and claws,” Harry says. He takes a sip of his tea before continuing. “Some of the more rough and ready denizens of the deep realms, lower abyssals and the like, have grown desperate enough to see if you are proof from a 9mm slug.” He winces at the memory. “It turns out you are not. There are other weapons available to them, more exotic, but firearms are readily available in this nation and attract little notice.”

“Damn cheating demons,” Mel growls. “How much you wanna bet every one of them is an NRA member?”

“An uncomfortable amount,” Harry admits, “but they are mostly just fans of Dana Loesch. Seeing one of their own rise so high…” He shrugs. “I’m prattling--mostly because I am exhausted and frustrated.” He pats Macy on the leg. It is a comfortable, familiar touch. “I was able to repair the damage to your veins and the tiny nick in your artery but you had lost so much blood that it was very touch and go for a while. Had Mel not used her power to slow your heart and freeze the action of the vessels you would have died for sure. It was a most clever use of her abilities.”

She smiles. “Well, the tourniquet I learned in Girl Scouts obviously wasn’t working. Probably because it was a demon femur but, well… I had to do something.”

“Thank you,” Macy murmurs. “Thank all of you. I have the best family in the world.” She would draw them close into a hug but it would probably spill their breakfast. She settles for tucking into the delicious, monstrously unhealthy omelet instead and they eat in silence for a while.

Later, when they have finished, Harry and her sisters leave to let Macy rest and she drifts off to a deep and dreamless sleep. She does linger for a moment on the name of the loa who saved her--Erzulie Freda. According to Galvin she is the fey, flirtatious spirit of those newly fallen in love. It has to be a coincidence, right? Perhaps she is also associated with young women in distress, or simply doesn’t like Bacalou very much.

But she did intervene when he begged, and he does look so cute in that ridiculous apron.


End file.
